Industry 4.0 has been introducing multiple modern and advanced technologies to efficiently and effectively manage and control production and manufacturing in various sectors. The agricultural sector has recently started experimenting with various technologies, like AI, IoT, ML, data analytics, and recently introduced blockchain technology for use cases in the agricultural lifecycle. The integration of these technologies offers agriculture solutions for multiple purposes scientifically. For example, IoT in agriculture is trending in almost all modern solutions due to the interconnected network it provides to connect, control, and communicate various systems remotely.
The future of agriculture technology highly depends on the research and development of agriculture technology solutions. Though agritech companies and startups are bringing innovative and novel solutions to the market using the latest technologies, these technologies are still emerging. Various unknown facts of these technologies make them vulnerable to threats such as data privacy, physical threats, electronic threats, confidentiality, integrity, authorisation, authentication, and accounting. As a result, IoT has been incredibly emerging with impact, potential, and growth but the technology solutions can be easily hacked and compromised.
IoT in agriculture has a huge opportunity to transform the future of agriculture, but currently, the IoT devices are limited in storage, compute, and network capacity. These systems are not yet energy-efficient and have issues of single points of failure. Hence, future agriculture technology should be high quality along with safe and secure. IoT in agriculture should be combined with other technologies like blockchain to solve issues of resource limitations, interoperability of security protocols, heterogeneous devices, single points of failure, and hardware vulnerabilities. Moreover, the future of agriculture technology is safe only if technologies used in the agriculture sector are interoperable, robust, distributed, and accurate. IoT technology is capable of building and maintaining such required services and infrastructure to support agricultural and floricultural supply chains.
To make agriculture technology reliable, precise, scalable, and efficient, emerging technologies need to be matured enough to understand and solve known and unknown threats, risks, as well as opportunities. Researchers in agricultural research institutes, laboratories, startups, and companies must address open research issues and challenges. For example, IoT-enabled agriculture systems should be designed to capture, implement, manage, standardise, locate and business data from agricultural production. Conclusively, emerging technologies in industry 4.0 have the potential to make future agriculture technologies efficient, scalable, and accurate. But, these technologies should be understood well before designing and implementing agricultural technologies to avoid insecurity, vulnerable threats and risks.